Sony defends PSN hack response time

Annoyed it took Sony a week to tell you your personal information was at risk following the great PlayStation Network hack?

You're not the only one. The PlayStation 3 manufacturer has suffered criticism – not least from US authorities – over the time it took to let its customers know what happened on 19th April.

Today, Sony hit back.

"This was an unprecedented attack," chief executive Howard Stringer told Reuters.

"A lot of these breaches are never reported by companies or it takes companies a month. You're telling me my week wasn't fast enough?"

PSN was offline for 25 days following the hack that left information tied to 77 million accounts compromised.

During the outage gamers were unable to play online or buy content from the PlayStation Store.

Today it revealed the games it is giving away free as part of its Welcome Back scheme. Users can pick two from a list of five PS3 games, and two from a list of five PSP games.

Sony also has to cough up for free a identity protection scheme for all users.

Analysts have suggested the downtime may end up costing Sony hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenue.

But exactly how much will the PSN crisis end up costing Sony?

"There's a charge for the system being down, a charge for identity theft protection," Stringer said.

"The charges mount up but there are no numbers yet."

Sony is working with the FBI to track the hackers down.